


The Glacier Knocks at the Cupboard, the Desert Sighs in the Bed

by BitterlyAlice



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Power Dynamics, Praise Kink, Rey Needs A Hug, Size Difference, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, so much angst and introspection, they just like hitting each other, this will eventually be porn I promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:00:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24158509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BitterlyAlice/pseuds/BitterlyAlice
Summary: When he feels her wince, Kylo Ren slides one of his gigantic hands along that same muscle, and he is warmer than any human being has any right to be. The heat of him soaks into her like an apology.  Better than an apology – an acknowledgement.  Rey has never had anyone notice her pain like this before; it doesn’t seem to matter that he’s the one who caused it.Rey lingers on Ahch-To, and lessons with Luke leave her feeling uncertain, off-balance, and very ready to hit someone.  Lucky for her, Kylo Ren knows how to take a beating.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	1. In Which Rey Does Not Hold Back the Tide

**Author's Note:**

> Look, right off the bat: this is my first fic. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. The plan is to write something light on plot and heavy on angsty banging, but...I'm just as likely to get overwhelmed with shame and scrap the whole thing. Read at your own risk, people.  
> Also, do I know how to format? I do not! Wheee, here we go!

It is the nights that are difficult.  
  
By daylight, Rey has more energy than she knows what to do with. The physical exercises Luke sets her come so easily to her that she thinks it frightens him. Sometimes she tries to be frightened too, to hold back, to remember that this is _dangerous_ , but...it’s all too exhilarating to be scary.  
  
She runs a lot, between training. The ground here is impossibly solid under her feet. Rey likes the way her lungs stretch and ache as she tackles – again and again and again – the endless steps of Ahch-To. She makes a game of it, tries some days to get down to the beach before the tide creeps high enough to steal a particular piece of driftwood, or licks the base of the stone steps. Rey doesn’t like to lose, even to forces of nature, and she thinks she can feel the surf almost like she can feel her lungs – the same sort of stretch and ache – and thinks maybe she could reign it in. If she tried. But Luke tells her while it’s fine to race the tide, she shouldn’t try to actually hold it back, and since she can’t be frightened for him, she tries to at least be obedient (which doesn’t come any easier). So, fine. She runs faster.  
  
The ocean, anyway, is incredible, and the rain only slightly less so. Running makes her feel good. All the physical exercises come easily to her: they’re great. But then there are the other kind of lessons: the ones where Rey sits cross-legged and argues with Luke until one or the other or both of them starts cracking rocks in half with the force (pun intended) of their convictions and Luke, of course, panics and tells her she’s bound for the Dark Side, he’s seen this before, and the tide of this place rises up to choke her. The energy and exhilaration, then, seem too large and too alien to be contained by her body, and she longs for an outlet.  
  
All of which to say: when Kylo Ren appears in the daytime, it is a relief to have someone to _fight_. It feels good to direct her frustration towards someone who so obviously deserves it, and (this is just as important) can obviously _take_ it. Kylo Ren matches her shout for shout, blow for blow, and he _keeps coming back_.  
  
No. Days are _fine_.  
  
Nights, though.  
  
At night the little rock hut smells like a place she doesn’t remember. It is damp and cold and earthy inside, and there are _noises_. Dripping noises and shifting rock noises, and the noise the incredible ocean makes, and cheepings and peepings from the sleepless porgs. And she’s alone. Again.  
  
Their first night on the Falcon Finn had dragged his cot into her room. “We slept in dormitories with the Order,” he’d told her. “I don’t like having so much space around me.”  
  
She had been relieved. Even more so when BB8 rolled in, softly whirring, and parked himself just inside the doorway. She hasn’t been alone like this since she left Jakku.  
  
It bothers her how much that bothers her. Rey is a big girl. She is not afraid of anything during the day. But at night she is a tiny girl with her stick-like arm in Unkar Plutt’s big fist, screaming her fury and fear into the sky. Every night.  
The first time Kylo Ren shows up in her bed she is dreaming about Jakku. It is Luke who leaves her there: he’s flown the Falcon and deposited her back in the dunes. “This has all been a mistake,” he tells her as he pries the lightsaber out of her reluctant hand. “You belong here. Just like you kept saying. Back to Jakku. We’re going to wall you in this time so you stay.”  
  
She tries to keep her composure as he stacks the cold stones higher and higher over her head, but soon she is shivering, then crying, then scrabbling with her nails at the rock. She’ll be good, she tells Luke, as long as he doesn’t leave her here. Anywhere but here, she cries, over and over again. Anywhere but here. Anywhere.  
  
“Stop.” The voice is calm. Deep. Confident. “You’re dreaming.”  
  
Her hands are caught between someone’s palms, the touch so shocking on her cold skin that it feels hot. It is dark, where she is. She feels, rather than sees, the presence withdrawing, and clutches at it. “Don’t leave me,” she says. Hesitation, then...  
  
“I won’t,” the voice says. “Go back to sleep.”  
  
It is the deepest rest she’s had since landing on this island.  
  
But in the morning her bed smells like copper and electricity, and she knows that the force bond brought them together again, and is deeply ashamed at her weakness.  
  
Kylo is waiting for her at the beach that afternoon. Rey doesn’t break stride when she sees him. She jogs the final few steps down, to where rock meets wet sand – and this, too, is a miracle: how seldom in her life has she seen sand that is _wet_? – and snaps her right leg up, kicks him squarely in his still-wounded side. As he staggers back she has already drawn her lightsaber and is bringing it down, ready to cleave him in two, properly this time, with that black seam on his face as a guiding line...  
  
As Rey expects, he blocks this strike. Then he kicks her legs out from under her. The ensuing fight is fast and brutal, and does not phase him in the slightest. There is the usual banter – she insults him, flings her fury in his face, her hatred, her shame, and he pushes back, invading her mind and picking through what he finds there, scavenging for loose pieces. He tinkers with her thoughts like they are broken bits of engine and he’s still deciding what to make from them. Rey wonders who taught him to do this, who did it to _him_. Then she grinds her teeth so hard she can feel the ache in her jaw. She doesn’t want to feel sorry for him. So she shoves him out, shoves as hard as she can, so that he flies halfway across the beach and lands with his feet in the water, staggering.  
  
“Stay out of my mind,” she snarls at him, knowing he will hear what she does not say: _stay out of my bed_.  
  
He seems surprised to find that his feet are wet. The tip of his saber trails in the waves, and she smells hot brine, can feel him smelling it also. She hates their connection.  
  
“You fear it,” he says, answering her thought. “You’re afraid that I’ll use what I learn against you,” he says, “but I won’t have to. It is your fear that brings you closer to the Dark Side, not me.”  
  
She tries to push him again, thinking to shove him under the water and choke him with the next wave, but he is gone.  
  
So she starts the long run up towards the top of the mountain and her next lesson.


	2. In Which Kylo Ren is Basically a Planet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up, there's a mention of child abuse in this chapter. Nothing super explicit, nothing sexual, but Rey definitely had a miserable time of it on Jakku.  
> Also, I will not be updating this regularly - I had a bit of this chapter written already, but after this we are in uncharted territory, my lovelies.

The next time it happens Rey knows immediately to whom the hands – wrapping so massively around her flailing wrists – belong, but to her shame, they still feel like comfort. She doesn’t shake them off.  
  
“Don’t touch me,” she whispers instead. She knows she should call the saber to her hand, light up this little hut with death, but Rey...does not feel the manic energy of the daytime. She is exhausted, vulnerable. And he is not goading her, isn’t dissecting her nightmares to find evidence of a diseased soul. He’s just...here. Warm. Breathing. Releasing her wrists.  
  
“You were dreaming about the rain,” he says. “That it washed the desert away, and Jakku was gone.”  
  
She knows she should hiss at him to stay out of her mind, should fling her skull forward to smash into his jaw, then roll off the bed and scrabble for a weapon, but his voice is so peaceful. As if he is half asleep himself. And Rey...shifts closer. Lying down his body seems impossibly larger; she feels as if she is falling into his gravitational pull. Warmth pours off him like sun-baked rock, and his breathing is soft, inevitable.  
  
If she kills him there will just be rain again, and cold.  
  
It terrifies her how easy it is to fall asleep.  
  
They fall into a pattern.  
  
During her daily run they circle each other, lob insults and hooked barbs and literal pieces of the landscape towards one another, push and pull and make each other bleed.  
  
“You’re a monster,” she tells him. “You betrayed everything. I will find you one day, and I’ll kill you.”  
  
She can’t see his face – his mask stays on – but she is learning to tell from their bond when her words strike home. When she makes him stagger and wince. He learns, too: “You are not settled in your mind,” he tells her. “Luke can sense it just as I can. You will betray him and everyone you now call friend.”  
  
They learn each other’s bodies.  
  
Not just the (now healing) injuries she gave him on Starkiller base, not just the obvious fact that she is smaller and weaker, but others. The bad shoulder from a speeder crash when he was a child. The way his big muscles sometimes make him slow, especially when spinning to the right. She becomes intimately familiar with the way he moves.  
  
At night, in the darkness of her bed, she learns other things. Kylo Ren sleeps shirtless. He smells like brand new power couplings. His hands are large enough to break her, and the palms are soft. He worries about someone called Hux. He sleeps with a weapon under his pillow.  
  
After a week of this, Kylo Ren lands a blow on Rey.  
  
There is scar tissue in her left knee from a bad fall she took while climbing on a wreck on Jakku. He pulls the memory from her while they’re fighting, and she feels for a second his admiration for the way she climbs – her form so much lighter and more nimble than his – even as his foot slams into the muscle above the joint. Rey has to throw herself into a forward roll to escape being decapitated by his follow-up blow. She limps all the way up the mountain that day, and she lies to Luke about how it happened.  
  
The lie sits like a sinkhole in her stomach.  
  
Later, in bed, she can’t get comfortable. Her knee aches. She is curled with her back to her visitor, not quite touching. When he feels her wince, Kylo Ren slides one of his gigantic hands along that same muscle, and he is warmer than any human being has any right to be. The heat of him sinks into her like an apology. Better than an apology – an acknowledgement. Rey has never had anyone notice her pain like this before; it doesn’t seem to matter that he’s the one who caused it.  
  
“Chewy used to do this,” he says after a minute. “If I hurt myself when I was small. He’d put one of his hands on it and howl right along with me.”  
  
Rey smiles, imagining a tiny, angry boy bellowing into the face of a much larger, much louder, wookie, both of them distressed, until a harried Leia comes to the rescue.  
  
But she can sense his thoughts, and she knows that a second later he is remembering another angry shout from that same wookie, remembering the moment on that walkway on Starkiller Base when Chewy shot at him. She’s surprised at how much the memory wounds him.  
  
“Unkar Plutt used to slap me,” she says, remembering the crack of that saucepan hand against her ear. “To distract me from the pain, he said. Or to give me something to cry about.”  
  
Kylo Ren makes a noise she doesn’t understand – soft and in the back of his throat. “I will go back to Jakku,” he says. “One day. And I will burn Unkar Plutt and his junkyard into ash.” Rey can see it in his mind, can see Plutt’s skin bubble and burn, can feel the satisfaction and the anger he’s feeling. It should scare her, but his thumb is stroking small circles against her thigh, gently, gently. It kills her how gentle he’s being.  
  
“No,” she says. “You won’t.” Rey shifts her body on the mattress – it is not entirely her stone bed on Ahch-To; parts of Kylo Ren’s bunk have been intruding lately, and she doesn’t mind. He has better blankets – until she is tucked under his arm. The copper smell of him is familiar, comforting. Metal and blood. The fingers on her leg twitch a little, and she smirks, safe in the darkness, to feel how unbalanced her closeness makes him.  
  
“It feels nice,” she says, just to unbalance him a little further, not, strictly speaking, because it’s the terrifying and relentless truth. “The way you touch me.”  
  
His breath is in her hair. When he inhales, she expects him to say something invasive and obnoxious. _You were starved for touch as a child._ Or: _You enjoy feeling power over me._ True, secret things.  
  
And maybe he feels her expectation, because he pauses, then says softly, “I wonder if you know what you’re doing to me.”  
  
Her back is flush against his chest. When he speaks, in that deep voice that is like a chasm opening under her feet, like a wound in the world, she feels it reverberate down into her belly.  
  
“Why don’t you find out?” she asks.  
  
There is silence in her hut and his room. The hand on her thigh lifts up and comes to rest on her hip, then slowly strokes back down. His touch is firm, and Rey wants to stretch into it, wants to squirm against him, but she holds herself still instead, keeps her mind empty. Kylo Ren is silent for a long moment. It feels as if he’s listening with his whole body, but whatever he’s listening for, he doesn’t hear it. After that long moment passes, he sighs, shifts back slightly so that their torsos are no longer in contact, and says, “Go to sleep, Rey.”  
  
And that hand, maddening, murderous, huge and soothing, strokes from her hip to her knee again and again and again, until she does sleep.


End file.
